"The one thing I bar," he said, "is having to get up at half-past five. And one day in the week, when there's a divisional field-day, it's half-past four. It's hardly worth while going to sleep at all. Still, it isn't so bad as it used to be. The first year I came to camp we used to have to do a three hours' field-day before brekker. We used to have coffee before it, and nothing else till it was over. By Jove, you felt you'd had enough of it before you got back. This is Laffan's Plain. The worst of Laffan's Plain is that you get to know it too well. You get jolly sick of always starting on field-days from the same place, and marching across the same bit of ground. Still, I suppose they can't alter the scenery for our benefit. See that man there? He won the sabres at Aldershot last year. That chap with him is in the Clifton footer team." When a school corps goes to camp, it lives in a number of tents, and, as a rule, each house collects in a tent of its own. Blackburn's had a tent, and further down the line Kay's had assembled. The Kay contingent were under Wayburn, a good sort, as far as he himself was concerned, but too weak to handle a mob like Kay's. Wayburn was not coming back after the holidays, a fact which perhaps still further weakened his hold on the Kayites. They had nothing to fear from him next term. Kay's was represented at camp by a dozen or so of its members, of whom young Billy Silver alone had any pretensions to the esteem of his fellow man. Kay's was the rowdiest house in the school, and the cream of its rowdy members had come to camp. There was Walton, for one, a perfect specimen of the public school man at his worst. There was Mortimer, another of Kay's gems. Perry, again, and Callingham, and the rest. A pleasant gang, fit for anything, if it could be done in safety. Kennedy observed them, and--the spectacle starting a train of thought--asked Jimmy Silver, as they went into their tent just before lights-out, if there was much ragging in camp. "Not very much," said the expert. "Chaps are generally too done up at the end of the day to want to do anything except sleep. Still, I've known cases. You sometimes get one tent mobbing another. They loose the ropes, you know. Low trick, I think. It isn't often done, and it gets dropped on like bricks when it's found out. But why? Do you feel as if you wanted to do it?" "It only occurred to me that we've got a lively gang from Kay's here. I was wondering if they'd get any chances of ragging, or if they'd have to lie low."